Original subtitles

In the 50 years since the experiment,

no one had done as extensive research as you.

Yes.

It started as a side project.

I used to do found footage films.

And I discovered the Stanford Prison Experiment.

I've heard about it, but never really digged into it.

I decided to fund a trip to Stanford

to go through the archive,

because I wanted to be able to film from the archive.

I thought it was fascinating to investigate this.

The narrative is very striking.

It's really a story about good and evil,

about these innocent young students

behaving like tough guards

just because they were given power in the situation.

It plays on the inner fears of people

that there's a monster inside of all of us.

Maybe all men are potential rapists.

Maybe we are all potential Nazis.

The monster isn't out there.

It's in you.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

became rapidly famous.

- The famed... - Stanford...

-Prison... -Experiment.

Are you aware of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Dr. Z, this is a high nerd moment for me.

I know all of your work very well.

My legacy is to make psychology appetizing

to the general public.

You have a rock band

called the Stanford Prison Experiment.

You have series talking about it.

In your cell!

And you have feature films,

a German one, an American one.

It's important to get it right, but for me,

it's equally important to make it interesting.

It was in many books,

books about group violence, World War II, obesity.

It was told in colleges, everywhere in the US.

I'm Dr. Zimbardo.

We're recreating the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Let's go, prisoner.

I have six participants involved

in something I call the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Zimbardo.

It has become more of a pop culture item

than a scientific item.

I want to reach the world.

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama

and Professor Phil Zimbardo.

Zimbardo says that the Stanford Prison Experiment

explains how millions of people could agree with mass murdering.

In Rwanda, people killed

800,000 of their neighbors.

That's the power of the situation.

He has a very simple explanation

to this very complex world event.

Maybe it was a bad barrel that corrupted them.

You really feel like you understand human nature

after you've learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Zimbardo became worldwide famous from this and other topics.

Philip Zimbardo.

Dr. Zimbardo.

-Philip Zimbardo. -Phil Zimbardo.

-Phil Zimbardo. -Dr. Zimbardo.

Philip. Philip. Philip. Philip.

Philip. Philip. Philip. Philip. Philip. Zimbardo.

Yes. Philip Zimbardo.

But after going through the archive,

I started to realize that the official narrative was a lie.

I hope that the message gets carried to the public.

It just did.

Well, you know, the popular narrative

for this thing, as you probably know,

is that you take these normal people

and you put them in this evil environment

and suddenly they become evil.

But, you know, I just, I don't think you can draw conclusions

from it because of the way that it was done.

And the effect that he had in tipping the scale, so to speak.

Zimbardo had a perspective he wanted to advance

when he did the experiment, that the guards did do evil things

and the prisoners did become more passive

than they might otherwise, but it's not the whole story.

If you want to have an experiment

where everyone's the same, you should use fruit flies.

We all behave because we have reasons

to behave the way that we do.

It's very good theater,

but I don't think it qualifies as good science.

At Stanford, in the archive,

you have pretty much everything that was recording

during the experiment.

You had the forms that the prisoners and the guard

had to fill, reports that the guards had to write every day.

A lot of press.

There was about six hours of films

and 15 hours of audio material.

For the next two weeks, I sat every morning at the library

and went through these boxes.

I also went through all the articles and books

written by Zimbardo.

I discovered in the archive elements that I found shocking.

Can you walk me through

what happened on day one?

It depends on what you call day one.

I found in the archive

that there was a whole training day for the guards.

And Zimbardo talked about this training day in his articles

and in his books,

but he's saying that it's just to restrain them

from using violence, for instance.

Were they given guidelines at all?

They were given very simple guidelines.

If the prisoners escape, the study is over,

maintain law and order, but no physical abuse.

Essentially they were given no training in how to be a guard.

Actually, in the archives,

you can see that it was a real training session.

We got these clubs.

They'll have no privacy.

We have total power in the situation.

It's totally controlled by us.

Totally controlled by us.

And the discovery of Kent Cotter

was another red flag.

I'm the guy that you never heard about

that you should be hearing about,

because I am the guy that quit.

Why is it important to know about you?

Well, not everybody participated.

I would think there would be...

that should have come up at some point.

I was born in the Midwest

and came to California as soon as I could,

because California was the place to be.

Everybody's doing drugs and smoking pot.

And so I came out to move to Palo Alto.

I did odd jobs, handyman stuff.

And I was doing experiments at Stanford.

In fact, I don't really remember any of them.

I just remember making the money,

and that was a good thing, other than the, the prison experiment.

I signed up for this experiment and walked into this room

and found out that I'd been chosen as a guard.

They had all the guards come to this meeting

to explain what they were doing in the experiment.

My feeling about Zimbardo

was distrust and suspicion.

There was something about the way

that he conducted himself in the meeting.

To me, it seemed like the whole thing,

we were being pushed in a direction.

That that's why we were there, to do what they expected.

It sort of escalated, you know,

it was like guys are really getting into it.

You could do this and, you know, you can control them like that,

and it was hard for me to listen to it,

but also I felt more and more isolated from that group.

I just decided I wasn't gonna participate in it.

So, I started thinking right then, how do I bail out of this?

Right after the meeting, I went into his office

and I told him I just couldn't see myself doing this.

I had a real problem with what the guards were saying.

His initial reaction to me was, "Well, why don't you stay, then?

Why don't you stay and redirect this?"

And I said, "I don't think it can be redirected."

I felt like this was set up for the guards to abuse.

So how could it go any other way?

Zimbardo wanted people to believe

that the participants were spontaneously responding

to the situation, whereas the case of Kent Cotter

showed that even before starting the experiment,

the participant could really easily guess

what Zimbardo wanted to prove.

What's also a red flag is that Zimbardo always pretended

that the guards made up their own rules.

First thing the guards said is, "We need rules."

And so they set about

to make up the systematic number of rules.

The guards made the rules?

Oh, oh, absolutely.

- Not you? - Oh, no, not at all.

But in the archives, I discovered a lot of evidence

showing that the guards were given the rules

that they were to enforce.

They knew what punishments they could impose to prisoners.

And in their own reports, they wrote at the end of each day,

schedule followed pretty closely.

Punishment.

They were following a script.

They were not reacting spontaneously to the situation.

Oh, this is all spontaneous.

The only thing we told the guards were,

"We want to maintain a prison here for a week,

do whatever you have to maintain law and order."

After all of these instructions,

I felt that we were all on the same page

with what we wanted to see come out of this,

and that was proof that prisons are an evil environment.

Given the times and given the fact we were students

and very anti-establishment, we would have done anything

to prove that this prison system was an evil institution.

We were happy to play that role.

Test one, two.

Uh, okay.

When you do your mic cable, if you bring it down around here,

come around to the left.

Can you do that?

My stage name is Nigel.

This is Nigel and Clive and the British Invasion.

Come to my dressing room.

And here I must leave you.

Really, really nice there.

The hair is growing out a bit,

covers the bald spot, doesn't it?

Which ones do you prefer? Do you like these here?

Or these?

These are a bit smaller, aren't they?

You're a star.

Go out and knock 'em dead.

Let's do some music.

A one, two, three.

In high school, I got very much into theater.

I was in every play, every musical, the choir.

And then I decided I wanted to be an actor.

My acting teacher always said, "Do not break character,"

and that is the goal.

Are you wearing your hearing aid?

The way that I was portrayed in the experiment by Zimbardo

was that I step into this evil environment

and suddenly I become this evil character,

when in fact before I stepped into the experiment,

I stay outside and I get in character.

And when I'm ready, I enter, and now I am my character.

You see how quickly the good boys

become brutal guards.

It's like it never occurred to them,

like they've never been to improv class.

One, two, three...

So, I decided I would become Strother Martin

from Cool Hand Luke.

He said, "You know, man, I can be a nice guy..."

Or I can be one real mean son of a bitch.

I would bang my nightstick against my hand.

I would say, "I'm gonna hit you so hard,

it's gonna kill your whole family."

And I kept a straight face.

He was pretty convincing.

"What we have here is a failure to communicate."

Prisoners thought it was hilarious.

I never broke character.

That would have destroyed the whole effect

that I was going for.

I like to stir it up.

You know, I was kind of a jerk in that way, frankly.

He was creative in his evil.

He would think of very ingenious ways to degrade,

to demean the prisoners.

A lot of the behaviors that appeared

in the experiment, maybe given a couple of months,

you would have seen the same thing happen,

I just made them happen in a couple of days.

I was very sympathetic to what I thought their goals were,

and that was to prove that prison was a lousy place.

Turn it around. Push-ups.

So, I may have made an impact on, you know,

the understanding of human nature with my acting job.

Thank you, 416.

-Over there. -Oh, that's perfect.

Not all the guards became sadists; only some did.

Phil makes it into like everybody became a sadist.

He became a sadist.

Guards behaved sadistically.

What it brang out was the worst.

Cruel, sadistic, dominating.

Going way beyond the rules that they had set.

You had different feelings

toward different guards.

Some of you were worse than the others.

You're all , but you're a really bad ,

you're a medium.

Some were really, really deeply into their.

These good guards were totally into the role

of being sadistic, controlling, dominant.

They're different people.

But Phil doesn't think they're different.

Professor Zimbardo truly believes that there is an evil

that lurks in every human.

He was using this experiment to make his point.

He said it's part of human nature.

It wasn't even true of the nine guards.

I didn't like being a guard at all.

I had a lot of compassion for the prisoners.

When I had been at Stanford in France,

I was smoking pot every day.

We smoked openly on the campus.

My first quarter, I took Buddhism, Confucianism,

and Daoism, Jewish mysticism, and Chinese art,

but I also just absorbed what I could absorb.

I'd had very close encounters with getting arrested for hash,

so when I saw this prison experiment,

it just really felt like it'd be a way

to have a cathartic experience of what it would have been like

had I been incarcerated.

When I was a guard, I thought pretty much every day

about giving some joints to the prisoners.

I wanted to be one of them.

- Three. - Three.

- Four. - Four.

Too slow!

- Five. - Five.

One day, the warden,

who was a graduate student of Professor Zimbardo,

took me aside and he said that they had noticed

that I wasn't acting tough.

They thought I was kind of laying back

and kind of letting others take the lead,

and I was pretty neutral.

All of which was true.

He kind of gave me a pep talk about how I needed

to help out my fellow guards and how to help out the experiment.

They did try and interfere with the way

the experiment was going

and they tried to mold it to their expectations.

They could say whatever they wanted to say,

but I wasn't gonna change anything.

Real scientific experiment,

you would not intervene to produce the results you want.

And you can see the experimenters

really putting their hands into the material

that they're supposed just to watch.

This is bad scientific methodology.

Unfortunately, when you produce science

just in order to make something striking,

that's when you're on a slippery slope.

With his team, Zimbardo was not behaving as a scientist.

He was behaving as someone

who really wanted to shock the world.

What's more is that the ethical dimension of the experiment

wasn't questioned at all.

You have the feeling that the prisoners could get out

at any moment and, which was not true.

Actually, the participants, they had signed a document saying

that they could only get out

with the authorization of Zimbardo.

One prisoner, Doug Korpi, is trying to rebel and get out,

and Zimbardo tells him he cannot leave.

Zimbardo told me that I couldn't

get out of the experiment with a tummy ache.

All I'm thinking is, ", this is for real.

These people don't want to let me out."

And I'm pissed off.

They threw me in the hole.

I was in this closet...

Don't let him in.

...on my side, lying down

in the dark.

And I remember being really like, "Oh,.

I can't get out of this experiment."

Somebody had control over my life.

I'm in this emotional state.

And then I got desperate.

I had to be creative.

And that's when I decided I had to act like I was crazy.

I thought, well, there's three things you need to do.

You need to be agitated in your body,

you needed to be screaming, and you needed to generate tears.

I want out! I want out! I want out!

All I was thinking was, keep this up, keep this up.

Try not to give in too quickly to saying,

"Oh, I'm faking it to get out."

You don't just sit and be upset.

You, you have to act upset.

I was acting agitated.

And it's a lot of work.

Somehow traumatizing to, to rev yourself up

into that mental state.

It was yucky.

In 36 hours, the first prisoner

had an emotional breakdown.

If you listen to the tape of the mental breakdown...

It does sound a little suspect, I'll be honest.

I'm burning up inside, don't you know that?

This door isn't locked.

So, if I touch this, it doesn't lock?

No, I don't think it, I don't think it does. No.

So, I should hit this one?

Starting on, he says,

"At some point, I was lying down."

Just at some point, you're lying down.

You want me to just start lying down?

Yeah.

In the action, you just woke up, but--

Okay. Sounds great. Yeah.

Zimbardo explained that he had a lot of material,

but actually, he recorded only six hours

of over 150 hours of experiment.

He recorded mostly the spectacular,

the most violent parts of the experiments.

This is also the way Zimbardo wanted it to happen.

Come on out.

One of the things that most

interested me about this experiment

is that what you have is people who are being asked to play

the roles of guards and prisoners

in a simulated setting.

This is cell two and this is cell three.

This is the cell room...

And this basically, immediately

is comparable to any number of improvisation exercises

that happen in acting workshops.

And see what we want to happen.

Which is a bit like saying

is there a difference between experiment and experience,

which are almost the same word.

Guess we'll never know!

In French, they are the same word, expérience.

And what really interests me

about these behavioral experiments

is that the way they get written about by the scientists

is always from this completely objective, distant perspective.

The subject behaved in this manner,

as if they're rats in a maze.

Nobody's actually asking the rats what they think

is happening, because that's not how scientists do it.

This is all B-roll.

How do you think the experiment has affected Doug

over the years?

He gets some gratification out of being able

to tell his side of the story, because his side of the story

is quite different from Zimbardo's side of the story.

And if Zimbardo had his way,

no one would say anything but what Zimbardo proposes.

It gives you some power

over what was a terribly disempowered situation.

The fact that one of the prisoners had a mental breakdown

because of the "treatment" of the guards,

it gave the whole experiment a huge pop, you know?

It's like, "Oh, look, even after five hours

of very mild oppression,

we can cause mental breakdowns in people."

Well...

Why didn't he understand

I was just trying to get out of a bad job?

Because he didn't want to.

That didn't fit his narrative.

His girlfriend at the time said, "This is out of control."

And he goes, "Oh. Oh. Yeah, okay.

You mean I can't have them kill each other?"

No, you can't.

So that's when he finally--

But I think up till that moment, he was, he was in heaven.

Yeah. He really was.

What is your understanding

as to why the experiment ended early?

What I'd been told was that Christina Maslach,

after witnessing my supposed magical transformation

from normal kid to sadistic bastard,

that she went to Philip and demanded

that he stop torturing these boys

and call an end to the experiment.

Probably there was good reason to shut it down,

not to mention that his girlfriend chastised him

for doing this.

That made a good headline.

I just began to feel sick to my stomach.

I had this just chilling, sickening feeling

of watching this, and I just turned away.

Down, up, down, up.

She came down, saw that madhouse and said,

"You know what? It's terrible what you're doing to those boys,

and you are responsible."

And I ended the study the next day.

The good news is I married her the next year.

The woman with fresh eyes

saw the inhumanity and woke him up.

God.

Wonder if he scripted that, too.

It wasn't until 15 years after the experiment

that Zimbardo created this narrative,

saying that Christina made the experiment stop.

He wanted drama and a Hollywood ending.

At first, Zimbardo had implied

that this had gone overboard, so we reined it in.

It was clear that this was not a structure built to last.

It was built to stay hanging there for long enough

to get certain kinds of images of behavior.

That was its purpose.

He now had a lot of material, a lot of video, a lot of audio,

and he might just have gone, "This is good."

The very first version of the story

that he tried to tell was the version that says,

"Prisoners are badly affected by prison conditions.

Look what happened to our prisoners inside a week."

And there's a truth to that, but it didn't sell,

because a lot of people turned around and said,

"Why did you do that to those kids?"

And so, almost immediately you get the Attica Uprising,

the bloodiest prison riot in American history,

which happened the month after the Stanford Experiment.

Nine hostages and 28 convicts were killed,

perhaps 100 convicts injured,

as the authorities moved in with force to bring an end

to a revolt which started last Thursday.

I don't think we would be talking about this now

if not for Attica, which made the prisons

this enormous thing in the popular culture.

We want to know why the guards and the state troopers

have gone in there with shotguns and tear gas

and killed that many prisoners.

What could be going on there?

What about the thousands of prisoners

who die all over the country?

Zimbardo realized that

it's a much better way to spin the story

if you look at what the guards did,

so let's tell the story that way.

Guards have total power.

Getting away with murder. Evil of prison.

Prison. Prison. Prisons.

This is what Zimbardo is brilliant at

is finding an angle in order to get people to talk about

the thing underneath it that matters.

We wanted to ask the question what happens

if you take people, all of whom are good,

and put them in a bad place?

Does the goodness of people dominate the bad place,

or does the bad situation come to corrupt the good people?

And the sad answer was the latter.

I did not believe that we were part

of the experimental subjects.

I believed we were helping implement the experiment.

You know, they never said anything about

that they're studying us, too.

That doesn't excuse lots of my behavior,

but it's a backdrop for some of my behavior.

If it was made clear to us

that we're there to be studied, not to help study prisoners,

we would have acted completely differently.

In the archive,

several guards say they've been shocked to discover

that they were a subject in the experiment.

Zimbardo, he pretended that they were not observed.

It's been a pleasure.

And the guards, they thought

they were a part of the experimenters,

they were not part of the subjects, which is a lie.

They thought they were like theater actors,

and the experiment was not about their behavior,

it was about the prisoners' reactions.

But they were part of the experiment, too.

He had this agenda, let's make something very striking,

very graphic, very extreme.

Let's go to the media with this argument.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was like a media event.

It was not planned really as a scientific experiment.

It was more like producing material

that could be used by the journalist.

The media was a central character

in the aftermath of the Stanford Experiment.

Right after the end of the experiment

Zimbardo was invited on KRON-TV,

which was a local station in San Francisco.

And there he met a TV producer, Larry Goldstein.

He had the idea of doing a piece on the experiment.

Zimbardo is telling him that there have been ups and downs,

but what Larry Goldstein would like to show

is the situation building up,

the violence growing and growing,

and in so he's pushing Zimbardo to change his narrative

and to have a narrative which is more linear.

On day two, the prisoners rebelled.

By day three, the guards were exerting control

over every aspect of the prisoner's life.

Only four days had passed,

and the guards' sense of moral value had been totally altered.

Things had gotten so bad

that we no longer had a group of prisoners.

What we had were individuals struggling for survival.

He's streamlining the story.

And that's how, in November,

they screened the piece on the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It gave a national publicity to the experiment.

Some of this video is just really compelling.

It has the feel of pornography without really going there,

and it has a moral justification

for why you're watching this thing.

And that kind of combination

becomes one of the ancestors of reality TV.

This was unscripted, free flowing.

It was creative.

It was a great idea.

And he knew it would get press.

This particular experiment

really made a name for him,

and I think that he basks in the limelight.

He really built his career on this.

Zimbardo, for years and years,

told this story to the media.

Please welcome Dr. Philip Zimbardo.

The guards then began to escalate their use of power.

Brutal, sadistic. Some of them creatively sadistic.

They were often here with no clothes on.

You can't see someone's eyes.

This prison is about to erupt.

He's a genius at figuring out

what will attract media attention.

In this demonstration,

we want to see whether ordinary people blindly obey someone

who seems like an authority

when he asks them to do something potentially dangerous.

What just happened?

What makes good people do bad things?

You've been at this a while.

I've been creating evil for a long time.

Welcome back, everyone. Right now at MSNBC,

charges of abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

These powerful images lie at the heart

of the prisoner abuse scandal.

Naked Iraqis forced to create a human pyramid

while US soldiers look on grinning.

The pictures were leaked to the press

and first revealed to the world in May of 2004.

Many of us are just trying to figure out

what happened to make apparently normal soldiers

to do the things depicted in the pictures.

You might wonder what kind of person

could participate in those situations.

When the news came out about the Abu Ghraib prison,

Zimbardo implied that Abu Ghraib

was the replication of his experiment.

I had seen those images 35 years ago.

My good guards did that in our mock prison

the same way these Army reservists did it

in Tier 1A Abu Ghraib.

That might be a little bit of a stretch.

If we were killing other students,

that might be a valid judgment.

Zimbardo acted as witness for the defense.

You testified in the court martial

in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Yes, I did. I was part of the defense team.

Coming to the defense of Chip Frederick,

what that gave me the opportunity to say,

"Were these bad apples

or were these good American soldiers put in a bad barrel?"

Before Chip Frederick went down in that dungeon in Abu Ghraib,

he was as normal, healthy as the good guards in my study.

And within several weeks, he was as bad as the worst ones.

At Abu Ghraib, politically he's saying,

"Look, it's not the individual, it's the institution."

Does it excuse any bad behavior you may have done?

You know, beyond my control,

you know, I was, I was following orders.

Now, we have this narrative,

the scenes of sort of homoerotic humiliation

that went on in the SPE are so much like those pictures

that we saw of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Zimbardo started talking about sexual abuse

in the Stanford Prison Experiment

right after the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Our guards were forcing the prisoners to engage

in simulated sodomy, exactly as in, in this prison.

He's pretending that guards made some prisoners

play sexual games in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Zimbardo exaggerated these games,

because it was very useful

to match the Stanford Prison Experiment

with the Abu Ghraib scandal.

But we know that's not what happened.

Abu Ghraib revived interest in the experiment,

and Zimbardo saw the opportunity for a book.

Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo.

It's called The Lucifer Effect.

The book is The Lucifer Effect.

Now, when you say the slow descent of man

from good to evil, it took a week, did it not?

No. It actually took 36 hours.

Without Dr. Zimbardo continually pressing his case,

the Stanford Prison Experiment would have lapsed into the haze

where most previous social psychology experiments exist.

It takes continuous pumping to keep the bicycle going.

When I started doing research on the experiment,

I never thought about debunking it.

Zimbardo was a reputed Stanford professor who did it,

and nobody debunked the experiment in 50 years,

so I thought, "Okay, it's not me, this French guy from nowhere

who is going to debunk this."

When I went through the archive,

I had no idea that the official narrative

was not what really happened.

But when you do science, you have a commitment to the truth,

and you cannot let something false circulate like this.

Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned,

but for me, it's a duty to make things right.

I decided to write a book

and to get in touch with the participants.

I got a call from Thibault.

Thibault.

Thibault.

Thibault.

Oh. Thibault.

Thibault, Thibault, Thibault, Thibault.

- Thibault. - Thibault.

He's very bold.

He wrote a book that was very damning in picking apart

the experiment and the methodology.

And I think as a result of his book,

other researchers are looking at the experiment

with a more skeptical eye.

I noticed, John, that sometimes

you, you close your eyes when you speak.

Is that something that you do often?

If it's normal conversation, no.

If it's thoughtful, yeah.

I'm a social psychologist

at the University of St. Andrews,

and I have been studying human social behavior,

in particular group and collective processes,

for more years than I would like to remember.

Around 1999, the BBC came to us and it said,

"We now have the technology, which we didn't have before,

to observe behavior systematically

and want to use that to revisit the Stanford Prison Study."

So, we took the same basic setup.

15 men randomly divided into two groups.

One group of men given power over the other.

We thought that the guards

would impose their authority.

And we were rather surprised to find that didn't happen at all.

They hated being guards.

I don't want to be a guard, to be honest, really.

I'd rather be a prisoner, really, in all honesty.

We began to realize that actually leadership

was absolutely critical,

because the more you look at Zimbardo's study,

you realize that the guards

didn't just become guards willy-nilly.

He acted as leader to tell them what to do.

But without leadership,

you don't get the types of toxic behavior

we saw in Zimbardo's SPE, and we don't see in our study.

When I went to college,

I wanted to stay in the arts and theater,

and I ended up in a place down in Southern California

called Chapman University, had a very good music department.

I love my music, and I create things.

I write plays, I direct them.

I'm a very nonviolent guy.

I can't even be mean to my cats.

And I think that comes from, a lot from my father,

who grew up almost Amish.

He's extremely gentle

and would never even show anger,

unless we really pushed him to the brink.

And I think that's who I've become

is kind of more like my father.

I'm mellow.

People really need to learn the difference

between a role somebody's playing and who they are.

Because of the experiment, I still get hate mail from people.

People that say, "You sick.

You sadistic bastard. I hope you rot in hell."

And you know, somebody going as far

as to go on to like my business page and talk about how,

you know, they went to get a loan from me in my business,

and I ended up, you know, torturing them

or something like that.

You know what I mean? Come on. This is my business.

Dave, you've probably had one of the most

notorious reputations.

They called you John Wayne

because they said you were brutal and you were sadistic.

It's been fascinating to see how the interest

never seems to go away.

I mean, here we are, it's been 50 years,

and, you know, I'm still talking about it.

I get asked to come and give a lot of talks,

do a lot of interviews.

What most people are surprised at is the level of humiliation

that we tried to put the prisoners through.

I started inventing my own daily humiliations.

When you give somebody the absolute power

to control what other people are doing,

then they're gonna use that power.

I go talk to high school classes.

The teacher will announce, "Oh, you know,

we've been talking about the prison experiment,

and I have one of the guards,

you know, coming in to talk to us.

The guy that they would call John Wayne."

And the students goes, "He's coming here?

Oh, my god. What do we do?"

You know, it's like, "Is he gonna torture us?"

So, I think they're always surprised to find

that, you know, I'm a pretty easygoing guy.

It bothers me that they don't take the time to look beyond,

you know, the very surface.

And that's one of the problems, of course,

I think with the way the experiment has been perceived

and has been disseminated in popular culture by Zimbardo.

Dr. Philip Zimbardo

is professor of psychology at Stanford University,

and several years ago engaged in a fascinating experiment

wherein he chose middle-class students,

put them all in a group. How many?

Well, there were a dozen guards and 10 prisoners.

Okay.

50 years later, the experiment should be irrelevant,

but I'm still pissed at Phil.

What happened that's not in the film

is that within 36 hours, the first prisoner had

what could be called an emotional breakdown.

It wasn't the experiment that pissed me off.

It was a stupid experiment.

There was a bunch of obvious manipulation of us.

But then he kept calling after that

to get me on all these TV shows.

They don't take your bed and your clothes in prison!

It was so many things.

You were a prisoner?

Okay.

That was you just yelling?

I mean, year after year, he's retraumatizing you.

I didn't like that I had to work so hard to get him to back off.

I was wondering how the prisoners' attitudes

towards each other changed during this experiment.

I was only in the experiment

a day and a half or two days.

I got out quick.

I don't want to talk to that guy.

I don't want to deal with him, and I had to.

He would come at me this way and that way.

And he was articulate and he's well-published

and he's gonna give me work.

I think that we are vulnerable to the conman.

We are vulnerable to influence.

The control of the narrative has been Phil's.

He can't help that.

He's just a narcissistic.

That's Phil.

Professor Zimbardo was kind of a clown.

I think the traditional narrative of the SPE

needs to be challenged.

Anybody that tried to reduce human behavior

to such simple notions is fraud.

- Fraud. - Fraud.

Fraud.

Kind of fraudulent.

And that's what Zimbardo did.

So, I'm looking at the camera?

In the last year, the Stanford Prison study

has received lots of criticism.

"The Stanford Prison Experiment is a lie."

"Zimbardo is a fraud."

And none of their criticisms hold up.

Zero.

I am Chuck.

- I'm Doug. - Doug.

Gentlemen, good morning.

- Morning. - I'm Dave.

There's the man.

- Do you? - And you are?

I'm Jerry Shue. 5486.

- Okay. - Hi, Dave.

Dave. How are you, Clay?

Hi. I'm Clay.

Clay. Karl.

Isn't this incredible?